


Mostly Flesh and Steel

by ishouldwritethatdown



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: AU - Emily refuses the Mark, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dishonored 2, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-08 06:45:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17976362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishouldwritethatdown/pseuds/ishouldwritethatdown
Summary: When Emily refused the Outsider's Mark, she believed she was saving herself from his trickery. But his cruel joke is clear to her when she retakes her throne from Delilah - she needs his black magic to free her father from his prison, and the wretched Leviathan had known this from the start.Kaldwins and Attanos are stubborn people. She didn't come all this way to fall at her last obstacle; she will find a way to free Corvo herself, and she would have the satisfaction of surviving this interregnum with nothing but flesh and steel.





	Mostly Flesh and Steel

She hadn’t given it a thought.

She hadn’t considered that with Delilah trapped in the Void and her witches cut off from her power, there was nobody to reverse her magic. That the writhing, twisting spires of wood and leaf and bone would stay writhing and twisting.

That the stone would stay stone.

“Father?” she’d said. His shoulder was rough and hard and cold under her hand, and that’s how it stayed.

The throne room smelled stale and bloody. Saltwater joined the bouquet as she brushed a thumb across his cheek. “Please come back to me,” she pleaded.

Without him, she felt like a lost little girl. A child torn from her mother by rough hands, secreted away into the hidden folds of the city with scraped knees and crumpled clothing. Her Protector had come for her then, with still-red burn scars on his shoulders and the fading bruise of a black eye on his face. Beaming to her, twirling her around in his arms.

She had thought about this reunion for weeks. What she would say to him as he blinked heavy stone eyelids and freed his frozen joints. How she would hold him as tight as she could and tell him, _You should be more careful, old man._

Emily felt as if she was drowning. Every time she breached the surface and tried to gasp for air, water rushed down her throat. There was no one to pull her out – she was alone in a vast ocean.

The feeling passed, eventually. She made an announcement to the city that she had ended Delilah’s reign and restored herself in Dunwall Tower. She used Corvo’s sword, sharp as the Void, to cut down the spiralling vines around the palace, and took down every image of her dear old aunt that she could find. There were people, at some point or other, who told her this was no work for an Empress. She ignored them.

The painting of Delilah’s false kingdom went down to the archive to be propped against a wall, unviewed. Her stone victims strewn about were removed from the throne room with considerable effort; they had to be pried out of the splintered floorboards and torn carpet and onto trolleys, and one by one they disappeared into the archive wing. At least they looked at home amongst the art.

Corvo, however, she would not allow to be moved. He would stay in the throne room, reaching out in fury and fear for an attacker that was long gone. She would see him every day for the next three and a half months while her people came to her with their concerns, their stories, of what had happened in her absence. Each shop owner, each guardsman, each mill worker who’d suffered in Dunwall made their grievances known, and Empress Emily and Lord Corvo listened intently to every one.

Every hour that she wasn’t in audience with her people or giving in to the thralls of blissful unconsciousness, she spent studying the arcane. If Delilah’s witches had any benefit on the Tower, it was that the books of their craft were scattered throughout it. She asked for all of them rounded up and started to work her way through the theories.

It was a slow study, made harder by the way the books were written. Even when the handwriting was easily readable, the wording was confusing, and numerous references were made to previous volumes or studies without the chronology of the texts being detailed anywhere.

Wyman’s letters came steadily, and she was glad to have someone to talk to who could answer her, but eventually she became so engrossed in her work that she stopped finding time to reply to them. Eventually, she stopped finding time to open them. Eventually, they stopped coming.

It was almost a full year since her father had been trapped in stone before the Outsider visited her dreams.

“Say the word, and I will give you the power to restore him,” he said.

She almost took his deal without thinking. The prospect of getting Corvo back in a snap of the fingers was enticing, after months spent waking at night with a desperate need to rifle through magical papers to find the exact wording of a passage.

But she wasn’t an idiot. She had been raised better than to take a trickster’s bargain.

“Is there a reason you’re desperate for me to take your Mark?” she asked. Eleven months ago she had been given the same proposition, dressed in different words. _Take my Mark and see the Empire restored._ She’d declined his offer, made her own way here.

And he’d known she’d struggle to bring her father back without the same Void magic that cast him in stone – he had to have. He waited until she was hopeless to ask her again.

“I consider Corvo an old friend,” the Outsider said, with an air of charity that was almost convincing.

“You’re not in the business of favours,” she said.

His black eyes narrowed at her just slightly. “I think I know my business better than you… _Your Majesty_.” He said her title like it was nothing to him – and she supposed it had no reason to be. “What’s your answer?”

“My answer is no.”

The Outsider came to her many more times in the following years. Each time he was so sure that he would have her at last, but each time she declined. Once the books left in the Tower were combed through in their entirety, from every angle and at every time of day, she started sending for more books. The Abbey seemed unhappy about the confiscation of their private collection of heresy, but they could hardly refuse.

They only started to get really pissy when she sent for heretics that had been captured and granted them their freedom in exchange for information about witchcraft and Void magic. Most of them were no help to her at all – “heretic” had apparently become somewhat loosely-defined.

On the twenty-second anniversary of her mother’s death, and the seventh anniversary of her father’s imprisonment, Emily Drexel Lela Kaldwin (first of her name) did not entertain guests in Dunwall Tower. She sat silently on her throne and twirled her father’s sword in front of her eyes.

There was nobody else on the whole floor – it had become some kind of tradition to ask the staff to leave her alone here on this day. The first times, she had covered every surface of the room with manuscripts and books and tried spell after spell after wish after hope. Fresh material to try dwindled, and she spent the time talking to Corvo instead. And then she ran out of words.

The Outsider made his annual appearance – sometimes he gave her the offer at other points in the year, but he returned on this day without fail.

“Has it hit you yet?” he asked, cocking his head to the side as he stood at the foot of the steps. He had his hands behind his back, and he turned with languid grace to face Corvo. He started to pace around him, as he often did, and elaborated, “That there’s really only one way to do this.”

She had long stopped answering his questions, and he had stopped expecting answers. He continued his monologue – if she hadn’t been dedicated to ignoring him, she might have derided his obvious rehearsal of this moment.

“In just three short months, you will be older than your beloved mother ever was. How much longer are you going to wait? Another seven years? Another fifteen?”

He stopped in front of Corvo’s contorted, frozen face and seemed to contemplate it. “Maybe until you’re older than your father, too. Is that it?”

The blade folded into the hilt with a familiar clattering sound, and Emily held it shut. “Bring him back to me.”

The words hung in the air like banners. The Outsider looked up and tilted his head at her again, perhaps thinking he had misheard her. There was no smugness on his face – only a faint surprise. He’d got too used to their routine these last years. “I’m sorry?”

“I said,” she drew out the sounds, made them heavy on her tongue, “’Bring him back to me,’ Leviathan.” She had years behind those words, now. Seven years of fortifying the way her voice sounded so that she could stand tall and alone, without needing Corvo or Alexi to stand around her.

There had been assassins. People who believed that the Empress had taken the heretic’s path, had abandoned them – even despite what she’d done for the Empire, weeding out the corruption in the Guard and Watch ranks and _encouraging_ the sovereigns of her nations to enforce fair pay laws for her subjects. The Abbey of the Everyman had become her biggest enemy, and there was no shortage of devotees willing to lay their lives down for the cause.

The irony of it. Thirteen attempts on her life for heresy, and all this time she’d been refusing the Mark of the Outsider.

No more.

“Whatever you need to do,” she said. “Mark me, burn me, replace my heart with the Void, I don’t care. Just give me what I need to save him.”

The Outsider put a hand over his breast and bowed, that devilish smile creeping over his lips. “As you wish, Your Majesty.”

The heat shot up through the back of her hand from somewhere deep and unknowable. She clenched her fist and watched the symbol glow and then darken, inked onto her skin like a brand or a curse. When she looked up, the Outsider was gone, and it was just her and Corvo in the throne room.

Each step towards him was agony. She should have been rushing, taking his face into her hands as quickly as she could, but instead the soles of her shoes tapped against the floor like water dripping from a leaky faucet.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

By the time she stood face-to-face with her father again, she felt she’d aged another decade. She was acutely aware of the wrinkles starting to emerge on her hands when she reached up to his cheek and his shoulder, feeling the rough stone under her palms.

She put her forehead against his and looked into the face twisted with agony that was etched there, and breathed, “Come back to me.”

She first felt the bristle of his beard, felt his skin soften, and then saw the shine start to come back to his clothes and the colour return to his cheeks. Strangled noises escaped his throat, and he blinked, blinked and his eyes were deep, rich brown again, matching hers.

“Father.” Emily fought back tears as she smiled, supporting his body so that he didn’t collapse, and he shook his head as if to clear it.

“Emily…” he said. After a moment of getting his bearings, he straightened slightly and asked urgently, taking her shoulder, “What happened? Where’s Delilah?”

She started to laugh and wiped her eyes with one hand. “Delilah has been dead for seven years. It took just two months to take the throne back from her.”

He cupped her cheek in his hand and murmured, “Seven years… Oh, my little sparrow. I have left you alone for so long.” He took her hand from his cheek and kissed it, but saw the Mark there, fresh and dark, and he went still.

She didn’t speak. For several seconds he didn’t either, and then he started to shake his head, slowly at first that then growing in speed. “No, no, no. Not you. Emily…”

She was surprised to hear her own voice reduced to a shuddering gasp. “It was the only way to get you back,” she pleaded.

All of her armour fell away until she was just a scared little girl, and Corvo wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close to his chest. She felt so childish, so selfish, that she would shirk her Empire and her values just to hear the gentle thrum of his voice in her ear again.

…But she would do it again.

Her stroked her hair and murmured into her shoulder the quiet assurances that he had given her after nightmares when she was young. “I’m here now,” he told her. “You’re safe. You are stronger than you know.”

“I love you,” she sobbed.

“Courage, courage,” he shushed, and his tears were as pronounced in his voice as hers. “I love you as the waves love the moon. I will not be pulled away from you again.”


End file.
